Here’s medical curiosity combining history, mystery, and riveting storytelling. Crosby (The American Plague
) relates the vexing appearance during WWI of encephalitis lethargica—sleeping sickness—through the stories of patients, doctors, and public health servants swept up in an epidemic that affected as many as five million people worldwide in a little over a decade. Despite a high mortality rate, writes Crosby, surviving the epidemic was worse than dying from it. Survivors were left insane and locked in a statue-like immobility. As interesting to Crosby as the mystery of sleeping sickness’s sudden appearance and spread, possibly in tandem with the Spanish flu, is the aftermath, which taxed the burgeoning fields of neurology and mental health. The mystery of the epidemic isn’t yet solved, leaving concerns about a future recurrence. The remarkable human connection Crosby brings to this scientific oddity helps enlighten readers about a pandemic forgotten in the shadow of the contemporaneous Spanish flu and till now memorialized only in Oliver Sacks’s Awakening. (Mar.)
